Natalie Portman, who refuses to play the fame game, writes Helen Barlow.
Natalie Portman is hardly your out-of-control young diva who dominates the tabloids with her antics.
If anything, the 26-year-old Israeli-born American actress, who has a degree in psychology from Harvard and grew up in front of the cameras, is a little too serious.
So, today, in an attempt to break down a little of her guard, I ask about her shoes. Her own line of vegan shoes, that is.
Wearing a brilliant yellow top and scarf and beige slacks, she raises her foot to reveal the ballet flats she is wearing.
"Most of the shoes [in the range] are heels because it's very hard to find vegan evening shoes," she says. "So I was, like, let's just make all my favourite shoes that I always wish I had, but with no animal materials in them."
Portman readily admits that she enjoys fashion. And fashion likes her - she is the muse of New York designer Zac Posen and a long-time friend of Isaac Mizrahi.
"I really love beautiful things and I actually don't take issue with borrowing things for premieres. I don't see it as me buying into consumerism because I really don't shop at all. I'm obviously lucky to be in a position where people give me things."
She is, however, not into hoarding and views stockpiling possessions as one of the world's ills.
"It's absurd: I have 400 pairs of shoes. I can't keep them all, so every six months I take half my stuff and I give it away," she says.
"One person who lives in the Ugandan village I visited in August [as part of her work for the Foundation for International Community Assistance] can be saved by having one pair of shoes. They walk barefoot everywhere and they've got ringworm which makes them more susceptible to malaria and that's how they die."
Weren't we just talking about fashion? Portman has a way of turning things around - even when it comes to her latest movie, The Other Boleyn Girl. She plays Anne Boleyn, the ambitious young woman who became the second wife of King Henry VIII (played by Eric Bana) after initially vying with her little-known younger sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), for his affection.
"By all accounts, it was very much a relationship of the mind," she says. "Henry was an incredibly scholarly man. He was a great musician and a great writer and Anne was really his intellectual match. There were constant reports of them chatting away in the corner of the room. The fact that he changed the religion of the country was clearly so that she could marry him. The philosophical and religious discussions they were having led to that decision."
Is a man's intelligence a high priority for her?
"I think the ideal is to have it all. You can have the intellectual companionship, but you also want the humour, the emotional side, the sexual side. But it's hard to ask one person to be everything. It's near impossible. I read an article in The [New York] Times saying that your partner now has to be everything and that it's ruining relationships."
King Henry certainly didn't believe his partner had to be all things to him, she says. "There was a definite division between his mind and his body; I think between Anne and Mary."
In the film, King Henry's court is painted as a sexual circus and there are clear parallels with Hollywood. At the Berlin International Film Festival, where our interview takes place, Bana hilariously refers to Henry as "the Hugh Hefner of the 16th century with a castle as his Playboy mansion."
Portman is not a circus creature in any way. She surrounds herself with like-minded types, among them Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael Garcia Bernal, her only famous boyfriend on public record. The couple reportedly split when the Mexican heart-throb chose to take his parents rather than Portman to Cannes in 2004. Portman made it to the festival the following year - to promote Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith. She also brought with her a new boyfriend, Liron Levo, her co-star in the Israeli film Free Zone.
The Levo relationship is now a thing of the past and Portman is dating former model and billionaire designer Nathan Bogle. And he suits her fine. It's tough being with another famous actor, she says.
"You're double as interesting to the press and if you break up then you have to see their face all over the place, which is hard. And you have to hear about [their] new relationships and that's not fun either."
Mostly, Portman will not discuss her private life. "It's not that I don't party, it's just that I'm not going to party where I know the paparazzi hang out. LA's harder, but in New York it's not bad. They're on one block and if you don't go there, it's fine."
Portman has just completed her first film with Gyllenhaal, a remake of Susanne Bier's Danish film Brothers. "I've been friends with Jake a really long time, so that was really exciting," she says. She has considered Lukas Haas "one of her best friends" since they appeared together in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You in 1996 and after appearing with Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights (not yet released here) Portman counts the singer as another close friend.
Working on The Other Boleyn Girl revealed the similarities between Portman and Johansson. This is partly due to their Jewish heritage, she says. "We both move our hands around a lot," she says.
"I don't have any friend I can relate to in the same way as Scarlett. I'm 26, I've been making movies for 15 years and I'm more experienced than everyone I work with. It's a weird situation that we've both found ourselves in."
Johansson, in fact, received her break in 1997 when Portman dropped out of Robert Redford's film The Horse Whisperer to appear in The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. Portman now has the more substantial role in The Other Boleyn Girl and while Johansson recalls struggling to breathe in the tight period frocks, Portman didn't mind. "I get so excited to have any sort of cleavage. There are no complaints on my end," she says.
It is not lost on her that in the film she plays the mother of one of her favourite actresses, Cate Blanchett, given that the Australian star has made Elizabeth I her own.
"Well, that's right, I have an Australian daughter," she quips.
Portman has even come to appreciate the Down Under sense of humour, thanks to her work with Australians. She bonded with Rose Byrne on Star Wars, with Hugo Weaving in V For Vendetta. "And Eeerric," she interjects with mock distain, when referring to her latest co-star, "he takes the piss out of everything."
Portman has compered the legendary live comedy program Saturday Night Live and has a lively comedic repartee when she gets going. Bana became the victim of this wit at their Berlin press conference.
"He was saying how we were all cycling together so I just made a stupid joke about how he could never find a tampon when he needed one." For once, the talkative Australian was lost for words.
So why don't we see her in comedies? "I'm really picky about comedy stuff. I find many dramatic scripts that I believe in but, somehow, with comedy, it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think you have to be even truer in comedy to make it work."
Portman is an only child. Her Israeli doctor father and American artist mother moved with her to the US when Portman was three. It was only two years ago that Portman moved out of the family home and into the East Village.
She has always aimed to keep her distance from prying eyes, ever since she was discovered in a pizza parlour as a child and cast in The Professional. "It was after dance class one day and someone approached me," she recalls. She changed her name from Hershlag to her grandmother's maiden name. "I have a different name on my credit card, my driver's license and my passport, so it gives me a real level of privacy," she says.
Portman considers herself American rather Israeli and, while not a practising Jew, she says she is "culturally Jewish" and plans to raise her children in the Jewish faith.
She returned to Jerusalem in 2004 for a semester at university and was able to avoid the media completely and live a normal life. She has always cultivated a life away from the cameras, even as she was growing up on movie sets.
"I don't think I missed childhood, I just had a different childhood. I had a really interesting one where I got to travel, meet people and learn all kinds of things. I got to live in France when I was 12 for The Professional, I learned to ice-skate when I was 13 for Beautiful Girls and I was lucky enough to have a stable household where my parents were protective and focused on my schooling and kept me away from the nonsense of it [show biz]."
She decided early that negative portrayals of women were not her style. She turned down Adrian Lyne's 1997 remake of Lolita because it was "too sleazy". Her savvy, sexy 12-year-old orphan from The Professional has attracted far more attention than her Star Wars princess. She was the only actor to know the story of the three Star Wars prequels in advance - or she wouldn't commit.
In recent years she has been broadening her range. Dancing around a pole as a stripper in Closer certainly showed her in a new light and even if the nude scene was cut from the film Portman asserted herself as a fully-fledged adult star for the first time. She even received an Oscar nomination. She shaved her head for the politically motivated V For Vendetta and gained attention with her sympathetic turn in Garden State. She again did a kind of striptease for a raunchy love scene with Jason Schwartzman in Wes Anderson's short film, Hotel Chevalier. She is keen to direct and is planning to adapt Israeli writer Amos Oz's autobiography, A Tale Of Love And Darkness, for the screen. That is some time off, she says.
Portman also takes a stand on political and humanitarian issues. She campaigned for John Kerry in the last presidential election and is a supporter of Hillary Clinton in this one. She is a strong supporter of FINCA, an organisation that gives small loans to women to start their own business in developing countries.
"I have been brought up in a politically aware way," she says. "My dad was always talking politics in the house. I think it's natural when you come from Israel to be engaged in politics; you are obsessed with politics. You're always, like, how can we make the world better?" One imagines that with Portman, unlike so many others in Hollywood, that will never change.
The Other Boleyn Girl opens this Thursday.
Source: The Sun-Herald
